Returning The Human Element To The Age Of Digital Duplication

‘A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by Five Hundred Individuals’ is a video project by Clement Valla, reminiscent of the experiments with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk conducted by Aaron Koblin’s 10’000 sheep and Bicycle Made For Two Thousand.

It uses the mechanical turk service to get 500 users to trace one line. However:

each new user only sees the latest line drawn, and can therefore only trace this latest imperfect copy. As the line is reproduced over and over, it changes and evolves – kinks, trembling motions and errors are exaggerated through the process.

The end result is like watching the deviations of message that occurs throughout a game of Telephone, and offers a different vision of crowdsourced visual production than the collaboratively oriented Wikipedia Illustrated. It also serves as a playful exploration of signal to noise ratio and injects a human element into the endless replication that is the bedrock of digital culture and technology.

Clement Valla

[via Curiosity Counts]